n
up with impunity, for, as far as ropes went, it was he himself who would
be in the minority. He might meet men who talked, long-haired,
mysterious chaps too soft to kick or radicals, though if the worst came
to the worst, he flattered himself that he had always the resource of
being unpleasant.

He knew that when the hair rose up on his head like the back of a
challenged bull-dog, and he stuck his hands in his pockets and looked at
people rather straight between the eyes, they usually shut up.

He didn't mind doing this of course, if necessary; only if he had to do
it to everybody in the hotel it might become monotonous, and he had a
nervous fear that consumption was rather a cad's disease.

Fortunately he had got his skates, and he supposed there'd be toboggans
and skis. He would see everybody in hell before he would share a table.

It was curious how one could get to thirty-six and then suddenly in the
middle of nothing start up a whole new set of feelings--feelings about
Peter, who had, after all, only just happened, and yet seemed to have
belonged to him always; and his lungs going wrong, and loneliness, like
a homesick school-girl! Winn had never felt lonely in Central Africa or
Tibet, so that it seemed rather absurd to start such an emotion in a
railway train surrounded by English people, particularly as it had
nothing to do with what he looked upon as his home. His feeling about
leaving the house at Aldershot had been, "Thank God there aren't going
to be any more dinners!"

Still, there it was. He did feel lonely; probably it was one of the
symptoms of bad lungs which Travers hadn't mentioned, the same kind of
thing as the perfectly new desire to lean back in his corner and shut
his eyes.

He felt all right in a way, his muscles acted, he could easily have
thrown a stout young man with white eyelashes passing along the corridor
through the nearest window; but there was a blurred sensation behind
everything, a tiresome, unaccountable feeling as if he mightn't always
be able to do things. He couldn't explain it exactly; but if it really
turned up at all formidably later, he intended to shoot himself quickly
before Peter got old enough to care.

One thing he had quite made up his mind about: he would get well if he
could, but if he couldn't, he wasn't going to be looked after. The mere
thought of it drove him into the corridor, where he spent the night
alternately walking up and down and sitting on an extr